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5 dollar gas...are we ready?

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Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

California's gas prices went up overnight to nearly $5/gallon. Refineries that make the environmentally friendly gasoline required out there have gone down so there is a shortage.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

BadgerAlum@WMU said:
California's gas prices went up overnight to nearly $5/gallon. Refineries that make the environmentally friendly gasoline required out there have gone down so there is a shortage.
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Eco-terrorism at its finest.

According to http://www.californiagasprices.com/ it is still just barely under $4/gallon in Sacramento, while the highest reported price for regular is in Calabasas at $5.699/gallon.
 
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Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

walrus said:
Wait till the 1st of the year if you want to see California gas prices spike

http://www.opisnet.com/lcfs/headlines.html

And then watch it spread across the country as other states(like Maine) adopt CARB standards
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To be fair, they expect the increase to be ~$1/gal for regular gas and ~$2/gal for diesel in 2020. They are not expecting a huge jump on Jan 1st, but a gradual increase as new requirements are implemented over the next 7+ years.

That said, the real solution to that expected price increase is finding a viable non-corn ethanol and non-food crop oil biofuel alternatives that can be produced at an industrial scale in the US.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

Almington said:
That said, the real solution to that expected price increase is finding a viable non-corn ethanol and non-food crop oil biofuel alternatives that can be produced at an industrial scale in the US.
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I think with some modest advancements with the mass production, algae with the best option. Up until a couple of weeks ago I worked for a company that wax putting massive amounts of effort into developing this technology.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

walrus said:
Wait till the 1st of the year if you want to see California gas prices spike

http://www.opisnet.com/lcfs/headlines.html

And then watch it spread across the country as other states(like Maine) adopt CARB standards
Click to expand...

Are you saying that other states are already adopting this?

One thing that we saw a couple of months ago is not only from a standpoint of regulation, but a standpoint of isolation. There's this little thing in the way called the Rockies, which means the west coast must either take product from the refinery out there, or have the product shipped in (of course, at Brent price). Any "eastern" state that chooses these emission standards would have to pay for a refinery (and in Maine's case, likely a Canadian one) to even change the refining process at an insane up-front cost. It's not worth the trouble.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

MattS said:
I think with some modest advancements with the mass production, algae with the best option. Up until a couple of weeks ago I worked for a company that wax putting massive amounts of effort into developing this technology.
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The problem with any bio-fuel is that it is still fundamentally a solar-based solution. A gallon of gasoline produces about 125 MJ of heat energy when it is burned. Peak insolation of solar in the US (assuming we want to stop importing our fuel for transportation) is about 25 MJ/m2/day. So to produce 1 gallon of fuel per day (assuming that your bio-fuel product has the same energy density as gasoline) would require an algae tank with a 5 m2 surface area, even assuming that the algae were 100% efficient at turning sunlight into fuel. That works out to more than 710 square miles of surface area for the tanks. By the time you account for the efficiency of the algae, maintenance of the tanks, etc, you'd easily need to multiply that by 4x at least, so you're talking about 2800 square miles - larger than the state of Delaware. We will never replace our oil usage with any solar-based solution.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

LynahFan said:
The problem with any bio-fuel is that it is still fundamentally a solar-based solution. A gallon of gasoline produces about 125 MJ of heat energy when it is burned. Peak insolation of solar in the US (assuming we want to stop importing our fuel for transportation) is about 25 MJ/m2/day. So to produce 1 gallon of fuel per day (assuming that your bio-fuel product has the same energy density as gasoline) would require an algae tank with a 5 m2 surface area, even assuming that the algae were 100% efficient at turning sunlight into fuel. That works out to more than 710 square miles of surface area for the tanks. By the time you account for the efficiency of the algae, maintenance of the tanks, etc, you'd easily need to multiply that by 4x at least, so you're talking about 2800 square miles - larger than the state of Delaware. We will never replace our oil usage with any solar-based solution.
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That assumes that we would replace all of our oil use overnight, if all we want to do is replace current biofuels over a 15 or 20 year period the numbers become much more possible.

Imagine being able to couple waste water treatment plants (WWTP) with biofuel production and the total surface area become a much smaller hurdle as it becomes distributed throughout the entire nation with nearly every small city having a WWTP.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

Almington said:
That assumes that we would replace all of our oil use overnight, if all we want to do is replace current biofuels over a 15 or 20 year period the numbers become much more possible.

Imagine being able to couple waste water treatment plants (WWTP) with biofuel production and the total surface area become a much smaller hurdle as it becomes distributed throughout the entire nation with nearly every small city having a WWTP.
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It doesn't matter what timeframe you do it over - you have to get to the Delaware-sized tank(s) eventually. I hope that we are so lucky as to discover/develop an algae/bacteria that can live in a wastewater treatment environment AND produce useful energy, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.

I suspect you're also drastically overestimating the surface area of wastewater treatment plants in the US. There are only 285 municipalities over 100,000 people. Dividing the 2800 square mile algae pools among those would be nearly 10 square miles per city. That would cover 25% of the area of Broken Arrow, OK (the smallest of the cities over 100k).

Even extending it to all 20,000 incorporated cities in the US still means that every city would need about 0.15 sq miles - or a tank 750 feet wide by one mile long. I don't think towns of 2000 people are going to be able to tackle that sort of project any time soon.
 
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Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

LynahFan said:
It doesn't matter what timeframe you do it over - you have to get to the Delaware-sized tank(s) eventually. I hope that we are so lucky as to discover/develop an algae/bacteria that can live in a wastewater treatment environment AND produce useful energy, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.

I suspect you're also drastically overestimating the surface area of wastewater treatment plants in the US. There are only 285 municipalities over 100,000 people. Dividing the 2800 square mile algae pools among those would be nearly 10 square miles per city. That would cover 25% of the area of Broken Arrow, OK (the smallest of the cities over 100k).
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I was talking about a only meeting a FRACTION of the total fuel, the 5 or 10% that biofuel currently meets. It would be a starting point, not the be all end all. The ability to convert the solid sludge wast from WWTP into a usable commodity would be a nice synergistic advantage.

Regardless, averaging per city is completely irrelevant, as WWTP surface area would be population dependent. To think that NYC would have the same total area as Broken Arrow, OK is foolish.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

Almington said:
I was talking about a only meeting a FRACTION of the total fuel, the 5 or 10% that biofuel currently meets. It would be a starting point, not the be all end all. The ability to convert the solid sludge wast from WWTP into a usable commodity would be a nice synergistic advantage.

Regardless, averaging per city is completely irrelevant, as WWTP surface area would be population dependent. To think that NYC would have the same total area as Broken Arrow, OK is foolish.
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I'm clearly not suggesting that Broken Arrow, or any other city go out and build these plants - for one thing, they all need to be in AZ or NM anyway, since that's where the sun is. I'm just trying to illustrate the scale of the problem which is inherent in *any* solar energy project, regardless of whether it's PV cells, steam, corn, switchgrass, or algae.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

LynahFan said:
I'm clearly not suggesting that Broken Arrow, or any other city go out and build these plants - for one thing, they all need to be in AZ or NM anyway, since that's where the sun is. I'm just trying to illustrate the scale of the problem which is inherent in *any* solar energy project, regardless of whether it's PV cells, steam, corn, switchgrass, or algae.
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Any changes to our overall energy system would be a massive undertaking, but that does not make it impossible or not a worthwhile effort to undertake. No change to the energy system is going to happen overnight, but you have to take the first step to make any change.
 
LynahFan said:
The problem with any bio-fuel is that it is still fundamentally a solar-based solution. A gallon of gasoline produces about 125 MJ of heat energy when it is burned. Peak insolation of solar in the US (assuming we want to stop importing our fuel for transportation) is about 25 MJ/m2/day. So to produce 1 gallon of fuel per day (assuming that your bio-fuel product has the same energy density as gasoline) would require an algae tank with a 5 m2 surface area, even assuming that the algae were 100% efficient at turning sunlight into fuel. That works out to more than 710 square miles of surface area for the tanks. By the time you account for the efficiency of the algae, maintenance of the tanks, etc, you'd easily need to multiply that by 4x at least, so you're talking about 2800 square miles - larger than the state of Delaware. We will never replace our oil usage with any solar-based solution.
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I think your estimates are way off. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but algae as a biofuel has excellent potential. And like others have said as a complete replacement for oil is not what I meant.

Even if you numbers are correct Delaware isn't really that big especially when considering we have oceans of algae.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

I'm familiar with Bangor Maine wastewater plant, if the area was 25,000 square feet I'd be surprised. Bangor is a city of 30 or 40,000.
 
Re: 5 dollar gas...are we ready?

MattS said:
I think your estimates are way off.
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You're right. I was off by a factor of 5.3 - too LOW: The United States Department of Energy estimates that if algae fuel replaced all the petroleum fuel in the United States, it would require 15,000 square miles

MattS said:
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but algae as a biofuel has excellent potential.
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Only compared to other biofuels. It is way better than the others, so people focus on its relative merits while losing sight of the big picture, which is that it is far from being a viable replacement for oil.

MattS said:
And like others have said as a complete replacement for oil is not what I meant.
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For it to become even a measurable percentage of the market such that it could have any effect on price, it has to be cost-competitive with oil. Either it is (in which case there's no reason it couldn't become a complete replacement) or it isn't (in which case it will never grow beyond a novelty niche market).

MattS said:
Even if you numbers are correct Delaware isn't really that big especially when considering we have oceans of algae.
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Good luck harvesting it from the actual ocean rather than captive tanks. The problem isn't the total amount of solar energy captured by algae or other plants - the problem is that it is so diffuse that collecting it makes it cost-prohibitive.
 
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